- cross-posted to:
- gog@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- gog@lemmy.world
With Linux gaming clearly showing it’s becoming more popular, and with GOG under new ownership, there’s hope yet that GOG will improve their Linux support.
GOG does currently support Linux — well, kind of. They publish Native Linux packages for various games, which depends on the developer (just like Steam does without Proton) but they have a very limited support of distributions, which can cause problems installing Linux games from GOG due to dependency mess. That, and GOG Galaxy does not support Linux.
There’s easier ways to install games from GOG on Linux / SteamOS though, which you can check out in our GamingOnLinux Guide. You can even do it directly in Steam if you want to.
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Ehhhhh.
I actually think the current model is what more stores should be doing. Have a solid web store/client with the ability to just download games without anything else. Provide hooks so that third parties (e.g. Heroic) can manage games for people.
Rather than assuming every single store needs to dedicate resources towards building out library management tools. Especially since EGS has shown that people will then just want social media on top of that.
Yeah, I wish there was a good way for third party clients to detect game updates, though.
Heroic seems to detect updates to GOG games just fine.
They don’t “provide hooks” though, Heroic’s Galaxy integration is reverse-engineered and could break at any point that GOG update how they do things. Providing a downloadable installer is nice for some people I’m sure, but most people just want to download the game quickly and easily with features like cloud saves available.
Yep, and even for me while I prefer to download the game directly usually, when I need to bother with manually getting it to work, I much prefer steam and its proton integration. It’s nice that most games at least just work by running them in a random proton prefix with protontricks, but shipping them with an install script that just gives you a shortcut and installs any dependencies would be huge (actually a step up from steam). And then if galaxy runs on linux it could use that same process.
I’ve heard that one before…
At this point I have absolutely zero expectations for GOG until they actually deliver on any of their Linux promises.
Isn’t proton open source?
They could make a Linux client that uses Proton just like Steam does?
Maybe even their own forks of Proton that are more suited to the kinds of games they have on the platform (like the Glorious Eggrolls spin offs).
They could, but Heroic already does pretty much everything an official client would do, I don’t think it makes sense to create a new client.
I don’t think it really makes sense to create Proton forks for specific games outside very specific cases (like hacky fixes that break other games). Might as well just upstream whatever changes you make.
I’m always leery of new ownership.
In this case it’s old ownership. And it sounds like he wants to focus on their core values without being beholden to shareholders.
Wasn’t it one of the original founders who bought gog from CD Projekt? So really it’s new, old, ownership.
I’d honestly rather them not release their own Linux launcher. Heroic is fantastic, I’d much rather them contribute to that, either via development time or by sponsoring them. Some sort of official partnership with them would be cool.
Been hearing this for years.
That said, with Linux market share growing, it makes more sense than ever before.
I really hope they aren’t fibbing this time.
It would be great if they contributed to open source projects like the Heroic Launcher, Lutris and even Wine and DXVK.
IMHO yet another store-exclusive (even worse if closed-source) sales + launcher application for Linux wouldn’t really be a step forward for Linux.
I expect that anybody who doesn’t have a fanboy relationship towards Steam already does or will if they just think a little bit, see that an open-source store-independent universal games launcher is way more free and open (and hence aligned with the Linux ethos and immune to enshittification) than any store-exclusive sales + launcher app.
As it so happens, given that freedom in gaming is GOGs unique value proposition, business-wise it’s IMHO more advantageous for them to (very loudly and very visibly) support open source universal launchers (and maybe even some kind of open games store front protocol and open source implementation) and windows gaming adaptor layers (like Wine) serving a community with a higher awareness of the need for Software Freedom, than pushing yet another proprietary (even if open source) launcher that only works with their store - a seamless universal launcher is far more likely to pull people away from the Steam App than a GOG App.
Under such a strategy some soft marketing of in their store website promoting Linux Gaming Distros for Windows users and of promoting those universal launchers for Linux users, might help pull more people away from the closed-source store-specific application of their biggest competitor.
I hope they also improve offline installers. Some games have really whack setups where there are so many patches you have to apply. Order matters, some patches seem optional.
I used Heroic to install FO4 and FOLON, all I care about using GOG for ATM, just to keep Steam from forcing me to update. It works just fine, thank you very much.
They stopped giving away free games. I don’t know why but they haven’t been giving away games over 6 months. If I’m mistaking correct me please.
They don’t give away games regularly, but often enough. Plus with Amazon Prime (you can sign up for a free month) you get plenty of GOG keys.
